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The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may
hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing
God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at
no great distance you must attain: there is not much between.
But over this divine, there is still a diviner: grasp the upward
neighbour of the soul, its prior and source.
Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a
secondary, an image of the Intellectual-Principle: reason uttered
is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same
way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: it is
even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent
forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is
the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially
inherent. But within the Supreme we must see energy not as an
overflow but in the double aspect of integral inherence with the
establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the
Intellectual-Principle, Soul is intellective, but with an
intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its
perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought
of as a father watching over the development of his child born
imperfect in comparison with himself.
Thus its substantial existence comes from the
Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in
virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and
act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme
Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this
intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all
that is less noble is foreign [traceable to Matter] and is
accidental to the soul in the course of its peculiar task.
In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine
quality of the soul, as father and as immanent presence; nothing
separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same,
that there is succession, that over against a recipient there
stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the
Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by
divine intellect and uncompounded.
What the Intellectual-Principle must be is carried in the single
word that Soul, itself so great, is still inferior.
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